Recommend me a new book

[avi]

even though I don't know how to read, I'll recommend anything by John Fante as good stuff

 

[minxnim]

i feel bad that avi can't read, you guys better not pick on him about it.



also a good book: gogol's short stories

 

[xfer]

actually, in my Secondary Assessment class, i learned that there's no such thing as illiteracy, because even a two-year-old is "literate" in block-playing-with, for example.

i get asked to recommend books a lot and i always feel dumb recommending the basic must-reads like A Confederacy of Dunces and The Brothers Karamazov and stuff like that. but yeah, conventional choices, but essential ones.

 

[AndICried]

Philip K. Dick - The Man in the High Castle

(Unless you've already read it)

 

[coelacanth_M]

hmmm.

try georges bataille's story of the eye - it's a weird pornographic sex literature from the 1920's. it's about milk and eggs. it's pretty sexy, actually.

also, "a cabinet of medical curiosities" by jan bondeson is really entertaining and well-written. it discusses stomach-dwelling snakes, a woman who gives birth to rabbits (but it turns out that was a hoax and actually, she was sticking skinned rabbit parts up her hooha when no one was looking. unhygienic!), gigantism, spontaneous combustion, etc.

i'm still in the middle of haruki murakami's "wind-up bird chronicles." murakami's "hard-boiled wonderland and the end of the world" was FANTASTIC. i think it's my favorite book.

and of course! i can't forget preston nichol's "the montauk project" which is about this conspiracy theory that is supposedly linked to the philadelphia project. it involves little aryan boys, time travel and sailors embedded in the floorboards of ships, and a monster, so you really can't go wrong. (it's supposedly also non-fiction, and sometimes you get the feeling that the author is completely schizophrenic, but hey! all the more fun, right?)






hi, i'm a dork.

 

[Reanna]

Oh i just remembered a couple other books that i liked alot that are sci-fi.. "Vurt" by Jeff Noon and "Pollen" by Jeff Noon.... both really really weird... Vurt is the better of the two...

 

[FalseTodd]

Philip K. Dick - The Man in the High Castle

(Unless you've already read it)

Nice. Yesyesyes.

 

[Veils_of_Cerpintaxt]

hmmm.

and of course! i can't forget preston nichol's "the montauk project" which is about this conspiracy theory that is supposedly linked to the philadelphia project. it involves little aryan boys, time travel and sailors embedded in the floorboards of ships, and a monster, so you really can't go wrong. (it's supposedly also non-fiction, and sometimes you get the feeling that the author is completely schizophrenic, but hey! all the more fun, right?)






hi, i'm a dork.

That sounds right up my alley, I love conspiracy theories.

 

[coelacanth_M]

oooh, are you into robert anton wilson and all that junk too?

 

[coelacanth_M]

oh oh.

another good one: "after man: a zoology of the future" by dougal dixon is SO good.

it's this book contemplating animals 50 million years into the future, after man has become extinct. all the animals are actaully based on the patterns of evolution. it has fantastic, beautiful-fainty illustrations too.

(nick and other cryptozoology-loving people: have you read this?)

 

[xfer]

i flipped through that "after man" book. it's really cool and very pretty. my biggest complaint is its almost total lack of sea life.

 

[Firedwarf]

I'll second that George R.R. Martin recommendation.

 

[FuSoYa]

oh oh.

another good one: "after man: a zoology of the future" by dougal dixon is SO good.

it's this book contemplating animals 50 million years into the future, after man has become extinct. all the animals are actaully based on the patterns of evolution. it has fantastic, beautiful-fainty illustrations too.

(nick and other cryptozoology-loving people: have you read this?)

This book pissed me off because there's not ONE fish in it, although there is a future-whale... except that's the only mention of any sea-dwelling creature in that book at all. Just one tiny page with this whale.

 

[IanDork107]

I don't disagree about the weariness thing, Ian--I've only read three Palahniuk books ("Fight Club" not among them, although I thought the movie was great), and I'm not too interested in reading more. Kind of like a slihtly-but-only-slightly-more original Tom Robbins. What I meant was the actual mechanics of his writing stink--his dialogue is sometimes wooden, and his descriptions sometimes make you wince because they're so forced and cliched.

Yeah, I agree about his not creating very convincing characters and being contrived. The only character in any of his books that stood out in my mind was Denny in the book Choke, and only cause I knew a guy who was EXACTLY like Denny in just about every possible way, so when I was reading the book I had that guy in my mind as Denny.

I think Tom Robbins is more hit or miss than Palahniuk. Good books by Robbins are: Chronologically from Still Life With Woodpecker till the present excluding Jitterbug Perfume, and the rest are bad.

 

[LuminousAether]

If you do read Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series, only read the first one or two. That series starts off good but ends up in anti-communist drivel. It's way too heavy handed, cliched, and the main characters are paradigms of moral purity which just gets so fucking old.

I'd suggest George R R Martin's Song of Ice and Fire way over Goodkind. Also, Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series has at least 7 great books in it, give that one a shot.

But the books I'd recommend the most are:

By Clive Barker:
Imagica
The Great and Secret Show
Everville
Cabal
Weaveworld
The Damnation Game
Abarat

Neil Gaiman:
Stardust (get the Charles Vess artwork version)
American Gods

China Mieville:
Perdido Street Station
The Scar

Jeff Vandermeer:
City of Saints and Madmen
Veniss Underground

These are all sci fi / fantasy / steampunk and they all rule. Get Clive Barker especially, he's the best author ever.

 

[xfer]

Choke was the first Palahniuk book I read. Sometimes I just wish someone else took his ideas and wrote them in a competent way...he did a reading of a short story in Boston recently about a guy who wanted to try "pearl diving": masturbating at the bottom of a pool. The guy dove down and got underway, and noticed this suction port there, so he stuck his ass up against it and kept going and it felt so good he didn't realise he was running out of air. Finally he did and swam upward quickly and noticed this long glistening snake-like thing following him; reaching the surface, he realised it was his sucked-out colon. I think when he broached, his mother or something was waiting for him, and he had to explain the colon and the pearls and everything else.


If someone else wrote something like that, I bet it would've been good! Stephen King could've written the shit out of it.

 

[IanDork107]

haha...that's a strange ass story (pun intended)

 

[Mr. Palomar]

try georges bataille's story of the eye - it's a weird pornographic sex literature from the 1920's. it's about milk and eggs. it's pretty sexy, actually.


(

Try his philosophy. It's really very interesting and he was hugely influential on Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, and Deleuze.

 

[Mr. Palomar]

oh oh.

another good one: "after man: a zoology of the future" by dougal dixon is SO good.

it's this book contemplating animals 50 million years into the future, after man has become extinct. all the animals are actaully based on the patterns of evolution. it has fantastic, beautiful-fainty illustrations too.

(nick and other cryptozoology-loving people: have you read this?)

This is awesome. It was my favorite book as a child. I was terrifed by one of the paintings of this little mouse with fangs from hell. I'm surpised I don't still have nightmares about it. And those cute looking rabbits with beaks? And the walking bats? I loved that book.

He also wrote a book about what dinosaurs might have evolved into if they hadn't become extinct.

 

[Mr. Palomar]

Uh, these are some really interesing novels:

Cosmicomics or Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
Encyclopedia of the Dead by Danilo Kis
White Noise by Don Delillo
The Tunnel by William Gass
The Franchiser by Stanley Elkin
Gerald's Party or Spanking the Maid by Robert Coover
Waterland by Graham Swift

And of course someone has to do it:

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

And Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Herman Meliville, and Samuel Beckett are awesome as well.

I'm sad. Between my classes and applying for grad school I have little time to read for fun anymore.